American Gothic

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ABSTRACT: Talk piece about the region of New York state where Timothy James McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing suspect, grew up, Pendleton, and the nearest city adjacent to it, Lockport. Timothy James McVeigh, the chief suspect in the recent bombing in Oklahoma City, grew up in the western corner of New York state, in Pendleton, a rural community of small farms and suburban homes twenty miles north of Buffalo and five miles southwest of Lockport. Pendleton is barely even a town, lacking its own post office, commercial center, and coherent identity. Until April 22nd, Lockport's most notable citizens were, arguably, the late William E. Miller (Barry Goldwater's running mate in the 1964 election), the late William G. Morgan, inventor of volleyball, and lately Dominic (Mike) Cuzzacrea, world-record holder for marathon running while flipping a pancake. It's a city of vertiginously steep hills built on the banks of the Erie Barge Canal–Lockport's predominant feature–which cuts through it in a deep swath and divides it approximately in two. To visit such wholly American places as Pendleton and Lockport is to be granted a revelation: how little where we have lived, with whom we have lived, and of whom we are born has any longer to do, in the public sense, with who we are. What connection is there between place of origin and destiny? Where Timothy McVeigh came from is of relatively little significance set beside where, as a young man, he went: into the United States Army and the Gulf War, to a semi-rural paramilitary organization called the Michigan Militia, and, it now appears, to Oklahoma City and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, with a crude homemade bomb, on April 19, 1995. Where we come from in America no longer signifies–it's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are. Writer also mentions the high school McVeigh attended, Star Point Central High School.